- Summer Assignment Planning is Underway; Info Sessions to be Held in April
- Postponement of Monthly Mass End and Termination Process in Workday
- Time Entry Can No Longer Be Entered After the End Employment Date
- Recent Improvements and Bug Fixes Related to Payroll Financial Transactions and Workday
- Providing Library Privileges to Visiting Researchers and Scholars
Upcoming Events:
Summer Assignment Planning is Underway; Info Sessions to be Held in April
Summer assignment planning is underway and the Workday team is working with Academic Personnel Services (APS), Payroll, Financial and Accounting Services (FAS), the Provost’s Office, HR and a group of representative college, schools, and units (CSUs) to finalize summer assignment processing instructions and plans for training and ongoing user support ahead of and during the summer period.
The central business offices and the Workday team will provide support to campus through a tiered structure. This structure will include training documentation, information sessions, summer assignment open labs, and additional (SURGE) resource assistance provided by the Workday Team. The complexity of your CSU’s summer assignments will determine the level of training and support your teams will need; however, it is expected that all tiers will be used to some degree by every CSU.
Two information sessions for summer assignments have been scheduled for April 9 and April 16. Info sessions will also be held at Pickle Research Campus (PRC). These information sessions will cover summer assignments entry, mechanics, and best practice for costing changes, Job costing tool usage, salary cap monitoring, retro changes, and how to handle niche cases such as 0% faculty and faculty that don’t work in the spring and/or fall but work in the summer. Invitations to individuals who may process or review summer assignments and logistical information for these sessions are forthcoming.
Postponement of Monthly Mass End and Termination Process in Workday
In December, the Workday team started performing a monthly mass transaction process to automatically complete End Additional Job, Switch Primary Job, and Terminate Employee staffing transactions for all fixed-term workers with end employment dates in the previous month.
After performing this monthly mass transaction for three months and gathering feedback from CSUs, the process will be postponed. In some cases, end dates had not yet been extended and the result was jobs were being included that had time entered on timesheets after end employment dates or jobs were not included when it was necessary. Because this process was not bringing the value to CSUs as expected, the ending of jobs and terminating of employees when the end employment date has expired will now be handled locally by the CSUs.
Human Resources will be leading the effort to provide CSUs with a list of jobs that need to be ended. HR Partners and HR Executives from impacted CSUs will be the recipients of these emails.
Time Entry Can No Longer Be Entered After the End Employment Date
Previously, fixed term employees have been able to enter time after their end employment date. This caused issues with ensuring that those hours worked were being paid out in a timely manner. Effective March 14, employees will no longer be able to enter time after their end employment date. Employees will instead receive an error message instructing them to contact their Manager and HR Partner so that the End Employment Date can be extended. The employee will then be able to enter time worked.
Recent Improvements and Bug Fixes Related to Financials and Workday
Below is a list of recent improvements and bug fixes related to Payroll Financial Transactions and Workday.
- Default Cost Centers and 26 Accounts: A validation has been put in place to prevent CSUs from making sponsored award accounts (26 accounts) the default cost center which will ensure validation audits are performed.
- Payroll Ledger Reports: Several fixes have been applied to the Payroll Ledger Reports currently available via the ERP Report Runner web page to ensure data is consistently listed in the correct columns. Additionally, the Payroll Ledger Report by Worker is more widely available to more Workday roles.
- Retroactive Cost Transfers: several Workday changes have been made that significantly improved the speed with which the Payroll Office can process cost transfers. More information on what you can expect on an ongoing basis will be forthcoming.
- Encumbrances:
- Encumbrance transactions should be posted by 8am each morning unless there is an error in processing. Payroll Services is working toward a process improvement that should lead to encumbrances posting earlier and on a predictable cadence.
- Longevity for 0% FTE positions were being encumbered and should not have been. A technical fix is in place in Workday to address this. Additionally, guidance has been published to the financials training page alerting financial roles to the fact that encumbrances will not allocate correctly if the compensation ends before the end of the month and the costing has an end date before the end of the month.
- Guidance for Costing for Compensation Plans with Mid-Month End Dates
- Mid-Month Encumbrance Issue Scenarios
Providing Library Privileges to Visiting Researchers and Scholars
In order for Visiting Researchers/Scholars to have privileges fully established for library purposes and to be eligible to borrow books from the library, they must be set up with the appropriate Privileges job classification when the Contract Contingent Worker, Hire, Add Job or Change Job business processes are initiated. “Fully Privileged” and “Official Visitor” are appropriate privilege levels to select in order to fully establish library access for Visiting Researchers/Scholars. The job classification field can be found under the Additional Details section of the business processes listed above. See the screen shot below.
Tip: More information on granting privileges can be found in askUS
Upcoming Events
Release Notes Available Online/Via Email
Release Notes, which include known issues, fixes, improvements, and links to new guidance are posted twice-per-week on the Workday Release Notes page. You can also subscribe to receive release notes via email. Please note that starting the first week in March, release notes are moving to a twice-per-week schedule and will be posted on Wednesdays and Fridays.